Wiki Usability
From RCC 2007
People
Notes
How do you get normal people to get in a edit the wiki when the wik syntax has become so hard to use?
WizzyWig - a rich text editor that is being built but has not been brought to wikimedia due to wikipedia has a lot of very confusing wiki syntaxs already in Wikipedia. The hard thing is trying to get wikiengines developers.
Is their something "evil" about enabling the raw html? Wikitext is suppose to be allow new users to easily edit it; opening up html makes it even more confusing.
Google "wordmacro for wikitext" -- It is called Word2MediaWikiPlus [[1]]
Looking at other wikis SocialText (runs socialtext.net, downloadable from them) DekkieWiki (runs wiki.com). There aren't a whole lot of choices right now that have WizzyWig.
We also talked about pre-done templates for pages that are structured the same over and over again you can see this in action at wikitravel.org
Uploading images to MediaWiki is really hard and confusing for the first time. Its one of the hardest things to figure out for new users.
Skins - drop an email to the mailing list of whatever wiki engine that you are using and you will find people are up to give their skin codes. When do you place things in the skin and when do you place it in the wiki? The skin is mainly for the site and wiki is for the actual content.
Many people don't get about wikis is that a large part of the page can't be changed.
Releasing things to people, most of software is released to the public as long as it isn't so specific to your site that it wouldn't be useful to any other site.
Blogs & Wiki's, do this mix? It was brought up that your user page is already kind of like your blog. This is more about building a Community than usability.
Problem with usability on wikitravel is that they are building travel guides and it is written by third person point of view and you get a lot of people trying to tell their experience instead of more enclyopedic content.
An editable group calendar. There is a wiki calendar but it is very wikable.
RemoteContributions
Is it editing that's hard, or is it simply not obvious that it *can* be edited? Look at TiddlyWiki, where the editability is in your face thank to the pop-up halo of controls above each tiddler. -- BillTrost
